American Medical Association seeks liability shield for physicians as healthcare AI risks grow

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AMA seeks AI liability shield

Highlights

American Medical Association urges new federal and state laws to shield physicians from liability when AI tools used as intended harm patients.
AMA policy advocates mandatory liability insurance for AI companies and calls for hospitals, insurers, and vendors to bear responsibility when mandated AI use causes harm.
Debate intensifies as FDA considers new regulations for AI-enabled medical devices, with hospitals seeking more developer accountability and device makers pushing to maintain current oversight limits.

Legislative push over AI accountability

As first reported by Axios, the American Medical Association this week calls for federal and state legislation to shield physicians from liability when AI products injure patients despite doctors using the tools as intended.

The physicians group is also pressing for laws that require AI companies to carry adequate liability insurance and disclose product limitations and performance data. Under the AMA policy, hospitals, health systems, insurers and health technology vendors should bear responsibility if the mandated use of specific AI products leads to harmful errors.

The AMA argues that increasingly sophisticated tools are making negligence harder to define in healthcare. It points to scenarios in which an AI system misjudges the severity of a case or produces a plausible treatment recommendation based on incomplete laboratory results or an outdated diagnosis, leaving a physician unable to verify the underlying inputs.

Regulatory and industry implications

The push comes as AI clinical tools spread rapidly through the health system, promising efficiency gains while taking on greater influence over decisions such as whether to order a diagnostic test or prescribe an expensive drug. Legal and medical experts say responsibility is becoming harder to assign as multiple parties may build, deploy and require the use of the same system.

There already have been lawsuits tied to algorithm-driven medical decisions, including a wrongful death case in Alabama involving a screening tool for heart abnormalities. In that case, the software developer was not held liable because its licensing agreement left final medical decisions to doctors.

The Food and Drug Administration is weighing whether a new framework is needed for AI-enabled medical devices, although its oversight does not cover all AI used in healthcare. Hospitals generally support placing more responsibility on developers and vendors to monitor system performance, while AdvaMed, which represents device makers, is urging the FDA to keep its current approach for evaluating generative AI-enabled medical devices and avoid broader post-market monitoring requirements regardless of actual product risk.

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